Thursday 2 June 2011

Assessment #3

My Blogspot:

So I've updated my blogger's design because everything was overlapping each other. For example the videos would overlap the widgets on the side, so I made the main blog section a bit bigger. I removed a few annoying widgets, because they were... annoying. I changed the feel of the blog a little bit by changing the texts and colours. It's still got a simple design. I've been adding a lot of videos to my blog as it seems, instead of talking much.

My Flickr account:

I've added pictures and videos of my VFX101 assessment progress mostly. I use photobucket more often because it doesn't have the limited number of video uploads of 2 per day.

My Delicious Account:

I've bookmarked and tagged my favourite or my most visited websites, which include the Animation Forum and Photobucket.

My CSUSap Website:

My website is about my animations mostly. I'm uploading all my works on here. They include the walk cycle, to my current assessment, the village kid.

What I've learnt from MPI104:

First of all I want to thank Matt Barron for being an Awesome teacher. This subject didn't give me a lot of problems. Though I could've dedicated more time to it. I learnt from basics of blogging to making my own website. I learnt how big blogging is and how good it is to share your ideas with others. I learnt about Flickr and how to upload photos on Flickr. This was helpful as I needed to upload my works to show to other people in my course. I learnt how I can add bookmarks in Delicious and therefore visit those bookmarks quite easily. I learnt the basics of HTML, although I had used HTML before. So it was a refresh for me. I learnt how easily you can build a website in iWeb. I had tried a lot before making a website in Dreamweaver but it is too complex for me. iWeb makes life easier. And I learnt how to upload my website to the CSU server with FTP.

Xavi the playmaker!

Lionel Messi rightly grabbed most of the headlines for his latest European masterclass in Barcelona’s 3-1 Champions League final humbling of Manchester United on Saturday.

However, the Argentine World Player of the Year’s superbly-struck goal, his 53rd of the season in all competitions, and his all-round brilliance distracted attention from the man who has been at the heart of the phenomenal success achieved by Barca and Spain in recent years: Xavi.

Regularly nailing more than 100 passes per game, with a completion rate in excess of 90 percent, the 31-year-old has perfected the playmaker’s art.

United were powerless to prevent him seizing control of the match as he sprayed the ball left and right, twisting and turning his way into space and leaving the English club’s players chasing shadows across the immaculate Wembley turf.

One amazing statistic from this year’s edition of Europe’s elite club competition, courtesy of Opta, is that in 953 minutes of football he did not concede a single foul.

A product of Barca’s famed “La Masia” youth school along with six other members of the starting 11, Xavi was 12 years old when Barca won their first European Cup at the same venue in 1992.

His father, Joaquim Hernandez, told Don Balon magazine recently that his son wept bitter tears when he was told he could not travel to London to attend the game with his two elder brothers and had to watch at home with his parents.

His triumphant trip this week to the British capital, nearly two decades later, gave soccer fans of all stripes the world over a rare treat.

One of Xavi’s predecessors in the centre of Barca’s midfield, Pep Guardiola, is now the club’s coach and the 2011 Champions League was, incredibly, his 10th trophy in his first three seasons since stepping up from the post of B-team manager at the end of the 2007/08 campaign.

Guardiola would readily admit that he never reached the heights that Xavi has scaled and it will be a near-impossible task for the Catalan club to find a replacement when he retires, perhaps in three or four years, which brings another topic of who should replace Xavi when he retires.

Good on ya Gerrard!

So I heard the Gerrard Pique (Barca Defender) has a love affair with Shakira through this comedy series (Crackovia).



Then it all came true when I saw this video of Barca players celebrating/dancing with Shakira. Good on ya Gerrard!

U21 Euro Championships

U21 Euro Championships is coming up in Denmark. And it means more soccer to watch during the mid-session break. Here is a cool promotion video that I found on the Internet:

Barca win!

Oh hey I'm a Barca supporter and last Saturday they had a game against Man UTD in the Champions League final. The match was at 4:30 in the morning. I was working on my animation until then so I just went to the common room and watched it. But I am missing my own soccer matches and trainings because of so many assessments due shortly. Here is the highlights of that match:

Animations

So I'm halfway into my second animation. I'm trying to make it look good as much as possible. I'm using Flash for character animations, making backgrounds and other still objects in Photoshop, and then importing in After Effects. I'm trying to give a 3D feel to it. Here is my first scene:

Untitled from Jawid Hassani on Vimeo.

How about I show my animations that I've done so far. So at the start of the session we had to do a walking cycle. I thought it was gonna be easy but took me about 30 hours of solid work. Now, I can do a walk cycle in 10 minutes in Adobe Flash, which is going to look a lot better. Here is my walk cycle: